It is four days since The Sun’s front page excoriated Jeremy Corbyn for his alleged disrespect to the royal family. Jeremy Corbyn did not sing the national anthem.
And today the same royalist respecting paper splattered its front page with a picture of the queen’s grand-daughter-in-law, the former Kate Middleton, flashing a bit of thigh as she walked along with a split skirt.
Respect.
Abdul Khaliq Farahi was Afghanistan’s Consul General to Pakistan in 2008, when he was kidnapped in Peshawar. He had already been chosen for promotion to ambassador, and was just weeks away from taking up his new post.
The kidnappers were insurgents from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they were not directly affiliated to or controlled by Al Qaeda. But they were aware that their best course of action would be to pass their hapless captive to Al Qaeda.
Negotiations then started, with Al Qaeda demanding a ransom of $5m for his release.The initial demand was for an exchange of Mr Farahi for prisoners held by the Afghanistanis. No demand was made for prisoners held by the US invasion force, as they were well aware that such a demand would be dismissed out of hand.
The negotiations were long, and it was not until 2010 that the deal was sealed, with the assistance of the Al Haqani faction acting as go-betweens.
Where did the money come from? Well, we know that the USA does not pay ransoms for hostages. But they do send vast amounts of unaudited money to people who do.
In the course of a recent court case in the USA (Abid Naseer was convicted in Brooklyn of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping centre) documents were presented which indicated where the money came from. Approximately $2.5m was contributed by Pakistan. Another $1.5m came from Iran and other states in the Persian Gulf. The remaining $1m was provided by the CIA.
This was not a case of the CIA blatantly breaching the directives of the US government. They have done that many times in their history. But not this time.
The papers released in the Abid Nasser case reveal the truth about US cash payments to Hamid Karzai since the invasion in 2001. Just as in Iraq, the CIA were delivering huge amounts of cash to the corrupt regimes they were bankrolling at the time. The CIA were delivering sacks of cash to Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace every month.
According to the New York Times: ‘The money was used to buy the loyalty of warlords, legislators and other prominent — and potentially troublesome — Afghans, helping the palace finance a vast patronage network that secured Mr. Karzai’s power base.’ So a corrupt regime of bribery and graft was funded by the CIA in cash.
To quote the New York Times again:
‘The cash flow has slowed since a new president, Ashraf Ghani, assumed office in September, Afghan officials said, refusing to elaborate. But they added that cash was still coming in, and that it was not clear how robust any current American constraints on it are. “It’s cash,” said a former Afghan security official. “Once it’s at the palace, they can’t do a thing about how it gets spent.”
The murder of Boris Nemtsov was Vladimir Putin’s fault.
There is absolutely no doubt about that, at least not in the minds of the editors of the mainstream media.
The first reports I heard on the shooting were on Radio 4, and they were repeated evry half hour or hour through the day. They unfailingly reported that Boris Netsov, “an opponent of Putin” was shot “near the Kremlin”. The juxtaposition of the two phrases was intended to have one effect, and one effect only; to imply that Vladimir Putin was behind the murder. Very few articles or reports mentioned the fact that Putin enjoys extensive support within Russia from ordinary people for his opposition to the west’s attempts to weaken Russia, and that Boris Nemtsov posed no significant threat to his position. Nevertheless we are supposed to buy the story that Putin is behind the murder.
Now I do not know whether Putin played any part in the death of Boris Nemtsov. But crucially, nor does the BBC or any of the newspapers peddling the”near-the-Kremilin” line every time they report the story. So why do they do it?
I am sick and tired of being told about the various bogeymen around the world. Life and politics is not that simple. And there are plenty of nasty dictators and killers whose regimes are not constantly described in grossly pejorative terms. First it was the Ayatollahs in Iran. Then it was Saddam Hussein. Gaddafi was the monster who kept ‘killing his own people” we were told. Most recently it was Assad in Syria. They were not so sure about him to begin with. But we knew he was the new bogey-man when the reports started including the phrase ‘killing his own people’ – shades of Gaddafi.
What is sickening is that the western media like to vaunt themselves as independent. Yet every time their rulers decide it is time to prime the public for a possible war with someone, they fall into line with horror stories and reports of atrocities.
Sure, there are lots of nasty regimes out there. And some of them are close allies of the west. Do you not think that, if international politics changed, and the west wanted to declare war on Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka or numerous other countries, the media could not dig up horror stories about those regimes?
If it is just, fair and ‘independent’ to criticise a vicious regime, it is equally just and fair to criticise them all. But if you select the ones that your lords and masters want to wage war against, and focus on their misdeeds, you are simply doing the bidding of the powers that be.
Independent press? The so-called free press is as blatantly partisan as the state-controlled press in the regimes they criticise.
Last week I drove to Glasgow.
There were two of us in the car. I used a tank full of petrol to get there, and a tank full of petrol to get back. The petrol alone cost me about £150. I did not need the car when I got there. We were staying for the weekend, and everything we wanted to do was within walking distance of the hotel. So the car was purely a means of transport to get us there and back.
Should I have chosen a ‘green’ alternative? I considered it. Return train fares to Glasgow are approximately £150, even when bought weeks in advance. So the public transport route would have cost me nearly double the cost of using a car.
It’s crazy to think that a society that wants to encourage less use of fossil fuels is organised in a way that pushes people to drive cars when the only reason to drive is cost.
Public transport should be free. Completely free.
I know from personal experience that, ever since I became old enough to qualify for free public transport in London, my car use has been reduced drastically. Of course there are times when I need to carry stuff around that would make trains and buses awkward. But nowadays nearly all of my London journeys are done on buses or on the underground.
If we are serious about ‘saving the planet’ there is a hell of a lot more we can do, apart from adding a tax on plastic bags. The powers that be would like us to focus our attention on the most trivial objectives; objectives that have little or no impact on the profitability of big businesses.
All public transport should be owned by everybody, and controlled by the workers within the industry, with a mandate to provide the most efficient service to the public, in terms of cost and effective use of public resources.
The myth that publicly run services are less efficient than privately owned and managed services is precisely that – a myth. The East Coast mainline was run and managed by the public sector for 5 years, generating customer satisfaction scores as good as many of the vaunted private sector customer-focused franchises, and returning £5bn to the government as income.
Bring the transport network back into public ownership, and let the people who work in the industry decide the most efficient way to run the service. The people at the sharp end know best.
Workers’ democracy differs from capitalist democracy in one major way. It enables the working class to control the people it selects to run the country on their behalf.
If you think that the present systems of democracy achieve that, you are clrearly a simpleton.
There are many ways in which the “will of the people” is subverted in capitalist democracies. The most obvious is the direct and indirect power of money. MP’s who do not have a firm socialist ideology are easily swayed by the moneyed classes. Get elected to parliament and as soon as you get to London you are obviously riding a very generous gravy train. The salaries and pensions of MP’s, especially the pensions, are so generous that they are rarely even discussed in public. Neither side of the political divide wants to upset that particular gravyboat.
MP’s who get through a few years of participation soon get the carrot of ministerial posts dangled in front of their noses. There are dozens of ministers in every government. And for each government minister there has to be a shadow minister on the other side, vying to get into power and enjoy the same priveleges that their opponent has at the moment.
And also from outside the obvious political sphere, money spins its nefarious web. Whatever choice a government makes, it has to deal with the reaction of business, “the markets” (whatever that vague expression is supposed to mean), the Stock Exchange and of individual big businesses. We are going to move abroad. We are going to fund and publicly support the other party. We are going to blame you for everything that goes wrong. And oh yes, there are also the inducements; the directorships, the business opportunities etc. Tony Blair is an egregious example of how ex-politicians can cash in on their previous life. But a quick look at the post-political life of hundreds of politicians makes it obvious. They all claim to have gone into politics to “make a difference”. And whatever they achieve in public life, they usually manage to make a big difference to their earning potential.
Workers’ democracy is a system that prevents all these consequences. Because it depends, first and foremost, on the ability of the voters to recall their representatives whenever they take decisions that are not in the best interests of their electorate. Immediate recall is the great leveller.
The first examples of workers’ democracy can be seen in the struggles of ordinary working people, during times of upheaval, to have their voices heard. The Levellers, the Paris Commune. Eventually these came to a head in the formation of the first workers’ and peasant’s councils in 1905, during the first Russian revolution. Those embryonic organs of working class power came to their height in the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the workers across the world celebrated the overthrow of the Tsar and the eventual establishment of workers’ and peasants’ power in the October Revolution.
The workers’ councils created by the workers and peasants of Russia had their flaws, and eventually succumbed to a bureaucratic take-over by the administrators and appartatchiks of the government. But that was caused primarily by the weakness of the working clsss in 1920’s Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union.
In modern times the ability of the mass of the population to express their needs and wishes directly are far easier and more immediate. And the modern working class, at least in the industrialised countries, is incomparably stronger than the fledgeling working class in Moscow and Petersburg during the early 1920’s.
In advanced capitalist economies it would be perfectly practical to issue a basic smartphone to every adult over the age of 16. Voting would then be caried out by electing representatives to push for whatever those voters wanted. The same technologies that facilitate Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and mobile banking can be harnessed to create a medium to enable every elector to express their wishes on who their political representative should be.
It is speculation to try and imagine how the people would choose to organise their politics and economy after a workers’ government is established. But I have tried to imagine how it might work, and here is a simple outline. You may not agree with it. You may vehemently disagree with it. You can out-vote me on your smartphone if you can get enough supporters. But here goes.
It may be easier to visualise what I describe if you think of the electoral process as something like a national Facebook site. Everty voter over 16 is allocated a unique ID and password.
Let’s split the population up into constituencies of 100,000 people. Every voter could be randomly allocated a constituency. They would vote to send approximately 600 representatives to a national workers’ council.
Workers’ representatives would be paid the same as the average income in the country. No special priveleges. Any additional expenses required for them to carry out their duties (travel costs, secretarial services etc.) would be paid directly by a central adminustration, not through expense claims.
At any time the constituents of a representative could launch an online campaign to have their representative removed. And if more than 50 per cent of their voters demand a recall, they would have to stand for election again.
The site could also enable various interest groups to be formed. Examples might include NHS staff, railway workers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, gays, car mechanics, florists. There need be no limit to the groups. And individuals could be members of several groups. A woman might be a member of the Mothers’ group and the Parents’ group, as well as a group representing her work activity, social interests, ethnicity, etc. It would probably be necessary to have geographical groups too, so you could have a say on what happens in your area. The role of all these non-constituency groups is to openly lobby for their own needs and wishes, so that the regional and national councils can properly reflect the needs of the whole electorate.
It is just an outline, and a very simple one, but whenever I think about the possibilities I cannot help getting excited. Once upon a time it was necessary for every genuinely democratc body to meet physically, hold a debate and have a show of hands. Factory meetings, soldiers’ councils, etc all had to down tools, so to speak, to participate in their direct democracy. NOw we have democracy at our fingertips, potentially.
Roll on the revolution.
What is the definition of an opportunist? Someone who has no fixed principles but jumps at every opportunity to make themselves look good.
This is a week of opportunism in politics, and it is still only Tuesday.
On Sunday Danny Alexander went on the Andrew Marr Show to announce his new principled opposition to tax evasion. He wants to make it a crime to aid and abet any individual who is trying to hide their true tax position from HMRC. This comes in the wake of the HSBC scandal which broke last week. A Tory peer and former minister was at the helm of HSBC when it was using its Swiss arm to assist British tax-payers to “skim” their tax liability. It came as no surprise to anybody that bankers and accountants were advising and assisting rich people to avoid and evade tax. But it seems to have surprised Danny Alexander. What DID come as news to me, and to most of the innocent public, is that assisting a criminal was not a criminal offence. We all know what would have happened to us if we had tried to assist or cover up someone who tried to claim housing benefit illegally, or claimed other benefits illegally.
But it is one law for the rich, and one law for the rest of us. So now Danny Alexander wants to make it illegal for accountants and bankers to aid felons. Big deal. When you have been in power for nearly five years, and you and your coalition partners have been vocally denouncing aggressive tax avoidance, the rest of us expect you to have actually done something about it.
Yesterday another scandal broke. Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been caught in an undercover scam, offering their services for hire. Rifkind can get you introductions to ambassadors. Straw can help you get what you want, and charges only £5000 per day for his services.
So what does the courageous Miliband have to say on the subject? He wants to table a parliamentary debate proposing that MP’s should be banned from holding directorships and acting as consultants while in office.
The horse has bolted, and here comes Miliband to the rescue with his barn-door closing strategy.
As I have argued elsewhere on this site, genuine democracy, workers’ democracy, requires our representatives to work for the common good, not to line their own pockets. Pay them the national average wage. If that is not enough for them, then good: they can work their little hearts out making the national average wage enough to live on comfortably.
So let’s ignore these publicity-grabbing politicians and move towards a genuine democracy, a workers’ democracy, where the people’s representatives genuinely represent the people.
When the Tories and Lib-Dems say “difficult decisions” they mean cuts. Cuts.
They would rather use six syllables because cuts is the C-word in politics.
So when they use the euphemism we should call them (the politicians) “difficult deNcisions” – its like Cuts, but with an extra N.
Irony is not Danny Alexander’s strong point.
The Treasury Minister who has diligently carried George Osborne’s bag for him over the last 4 years or so, and happily popped up on screen to present the ‘human face’ of the cuts imposed by the Coalition, sprang to the defence of his Lib-Dem leader yesterday.
Mr Clegg was criticized by one of his own MP’s, Jeremy Browne, for leaving the Lib Dems in a “no-man’s land” between the Conservatives and Labour. Mr Browne has surely been a Liberal for long enough to know that his party has always tried yo position itself in the middle. They are the ‘nice’ Tories, attacking workers’ earnings, social benefits and long-won gains such as the NHS just like the Tories, but doing it with a sadder face. At the same time they try and present themselves as having a social conscience, caring about the poor and disabled, while again with sad faces attacking their benefits and rights with their Tory chums.
So when Danny says in a press interview “Far from being in a no-man’s land, our party stands proud of its record of economic competence during these difficult years” he sees no irony in that statement.
Meanwhile, on another page of the same newspaper, they report that the biggest cuts to public spending have been in the areas of greatest deprivation.
Since 2010-11 the amount the government spends has dropped by hundreds of pounds per head in areas like Manchester, Knowsley, Rochdale, and Liverpool. The cuts (oops, we don’t use the C-word in politics, I should say ‘austerity’) in these areas amount to about £300 or more per person per year. In the less deprived areas like St Albans the cuts have been £38.02 per head, in Richmond-upon-Thames they were £43.54, and in Wokingham the cuts were a mere £2.29.
Wokingham is probably a special case, because any spending cuts in that area might affect the Henley Regatta, which takes place on its banks every summer.
So Mr Alexander, if you are so proud of your economic competence, I can only presume that it was always your intention to attack the poor disproportionately.
Your Tory friends must be so proud of you.
Vicky Pryce has written an article for The Evening Standard setting out what she thinks will decide the forthcoming election. She is an economist. And she argues that “It’s still the economy, stupid”.
She makes a good point in her opening paragraph: “in reality voters are not stupid. What matters to them is the economy and jobs.” But in the very next sentence she lets you know that she is the economist who is clever enough to explain capitalist economics to us uneducated masses. She says; “Yet the information they are given on which to base their decisions is often biased, wrong, or wilfully distorts the truth. It is important that voters have the proper economic evidence: this is where the real battles will be fought.”
So here comes Vicky Pryce bringing “proper economic evidence” to the masses.
The problem I have with academic economists is that they purport to have “theories” which are based on some kind of scientific principles. But in fact their so-called science is nothing more than a description of what is in front of their eyes. No analysis. No attempt to go beyond superficial appearances and understand the reasons for the changes in world capitalism; growth, shrinkage, stagnation or even collapse. If they had anticipated the economic crash in 2008-2009, or had told us at the start of the recession that austerity measures would be counter-productive, they might have a little credibility. But most of them simply run with the crowd.
Where was Vicky Pryce’s when her husband was a Liberal minister in the coalition government, and joined the Tories in enthusiastically cutting the wages and social support for working people? She would have been a more credible economic commentator if she had rushed to the printing presses to attack a theory that she is now convinced is counter-productive.. When she gave evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee in 2013 on the Eurozone crisis she commented:
“We are having countries where GDP is declining, like in Greece for the sixth year running, and loads of other countries. Of course, we are forecasting growth possibly to resume next year but perhaps not, so there will be more declines in some of the really big countries, including of course France, Italy and Spain.”
That’s what impresses me. We are forecasting growth to resume next year, then IMMEDIATELY she adds “but perhaps not”. There’s a really useful forecast. A few years later and we know what that forecast was worth: less than the paper it was recorded on in Hansard.
So what has Vicky got to tell us about the electorate and economics. Apparently the main issue is the deficit. “At the centre of the issue are policies aimed at eliminating the UK’s budget deficit, currently around five per cent of GDP.” That’s at the centre of the issue. That is that what the electorate genuinely feels strongly about.
In the last 10 years total government debt (i.e. all government debt minus its liquid assets) has more than doubled from less than £500 bn in 2003 to approximately £1.2 trn in 2013. In the same period total debt has also more than doubled as a percentage of GDP from less than 40% to 90%. The reasons for the sudden increase in debt do not need to be considered by our learned Vicky. They are not relevant to her message.
And her message is very straightforward. The politicians tell us we have to reduce the deficit. Therefore we have to reduce the deficit. Not very scientific, Vicky. Perhaps you could preface your conclusion with the phrase “economic theory tells us that …” and then we will definitely be convinced. Vicky is simply buying in to the right-wing cuts programme (euphemistically called “austerity” in the hope we will not realise what they are doing) which George Osborne and his Liberal cronies have been so enthusiastically espousing since the last general election.
Then later in the same article she says: “But again the evidence would suggest that there is nothing sacrosanct about a balanced budget — and nothing sacrosanct about when to reach it, especially if interest rates for government borrowing remain low.” I am afraid all this economic theory and evidence is confusing me, Vicky. One minute we all have to knuckle down and put up with the cuts Osborne, Danny Alexander, Vince Cable, Ed Balls and Miliband unanimously agree we have to suffer. The next minute “the evidence” suggests we do not.
Meanwhile we look at Greece and we see an increasing number of working class people attracted to the Syriza programme. Clearly there are economists with theories different from Vicky Pryce. The academic economists in Syriza, university trained and qualified, seem to think writing off half of Greece’s debt would be good economic policy. So too does the free-trade espousing Economist magazine.
So stop parading your opinion as science, Vicky.
Working people across Europe are not stupid. We know that ‘austerity’ means forcing ordinary people to pay for the financial crisis in the financial sector that they did not create.
It is time for working people across Europe to stand up and say the debts incurred by our capitalist leaders are not our debts. We repudiate them. Take over the banks, finance houses and insurance institutions in the name of the people, and put them under workers’ democratic control.
Our assets should be used for our benefit, not for the protection of the wealth and privilege of the few.
The victory of Syriza in the Greek elections on 25 January show the willingness of the working class to stand up to vicious attacks by the ruling class on their living standards and hard-won rights.
Syriza is vaunted as “radical leftics”, “communist” or even “Marxist” in the right-wing press. They are none of the above.
While the working class of Greece suffers and struggles to scrape by, their hatred of the “austerity” programme struggles to find an expression. Alexander Tsipras and his allies spring to the defence of capitalism in its moment of need. With their rhetoric and left-sounding phrases, they work to divert the working class outrage away from outright opposition to capitalism. They tell the working class that it is not capitalism that is at fault. It is “bad” capitalism. Those ogres in the troika (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) are the culprits. If they would only follow Syriza’s programme, capitalism, the Euro and the Eurozone could all be saved.
The programme advocated by Syriza is surprisingly similar to the programme advocated by The Economist magazine for several years. In June 2011 The Economist wrote of the EU leaders: “their strategy of denial—refusing to accept that Greece cannot pay its debts—has become untenable”. They went on to suggest, “While the EU’s leaders are trying to deny the need for default, a rising chorus is taking the opposite line. Greece should embrace default, walk away from its debts, abandon the euro and bring back the drachma (in a similar way to Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931 or Argentina dumping its currency board in 2001).”
Defaulting on debt is a fine capitalist tradition. It does not make you a socialist to merely acknowledge that Greece cannot repay its debts.
Instead of trying to get the Eoropean leaders and the IMF to agree to reduce their debt by 50 per cent (Syriza’s policy) the Greek working class should repudiate the whole debt. That money was not lent to the Greek working class. It was lent to the thieves and brigands who ran capitalism on behalf of the ruling classes. It is time for all working class Greeks to repudiate not only these capitalist loans, but the capitalist system itself. If refusing to pay back the punishing debts to capitalist lenders results in any furtherlowering of living standards, the Greeks should take over the banks, insurance companies and finance houses and put them under workers’ control. Workers’ control, in this context, means control by a government voted for and directly answerable to the Greek working class. Not a government elected for 4 or 5 years, and subject to manipulation and control by foreign governments, corporations and institutions.
The Greeks, who pride themselves in being the founders of democracy, have an opportunity to lead the world again in establishing the first workers’ democracy in an advanced capitalist economy.